I’m of two minds on Underground Airlines. On the one hand, judging it strictly on its own merits, it’s an thought-provoking and interesting book. The basic premise is that the Civil War never happened, and slavery was never abolished. It still exists in the United States in four southern states (the “Hard Four”). The story centers around Victor, an escaped slave who was caught by the government and now works for them as a sort of bounty hunter, tracking down other escaped slaves. In Underground […]
A worthy literary endeavor that left me underwhelmed
Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Underground Railroad, was another Mocha Girls Read book club selection. The novel follows Cora on her Odyssey-like journey to escape slavery traveling a magical realistic underground railroad. “Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor – if you can keep it, it is yours. Your property, slave or continent. The American imperative.” – page 80 It begins in Africa following the first slaves as they were stolen and brought over to America. From […]
Slavery and “freedom” in the new world
There has been a lot of buzz surrounding The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead. It was, of course, on my most-used book list this year: NPR’s Best Books of 2016. But just in case that’s not enough, it also won the Pulitzer Price and the National Book Award. I’d heard a little bit about it before reading it, and I have to say I wasn’t sold on it. A real underground railroad during slavery? I couldn’t understand why Whitehead would feel the need to add that fantastical […]
When Speculative Fiction Speculates All Too Well
Like many of the books I read, I first heard about Underground Airlines on NPR—in a book review by Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air. It came out about the same time as Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Because I read Whitehead’s novel first, that world was rattling through my head as I entered the alternative history that Ben Winter has created—where the civil war never happened and where slavery still exists in the United States, even if it’s only confined to four southern states. It’s […]
Another YA series where the protagonists will fight an evil Empire
3.5 stars Spoiler warning! Some spoilers for the early parts of the book in this review (although some of it is already spoiled in the book’s blurb). We’re back to me reviewing books I read a month ago, so Goodreads will have to help me out here: Laia is a slave. Elias is a soldier. Neither is free. Under the Martial Empire, defiance is met with death. Those that do not vow their blood and bodies to the Emperor risk the execution of their loved […]
Two books so close as to be indistinguishable
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide; and The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness by Carol Anderson and Michelle Alexander
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell […]
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